The ganguro subculture originated in Japan in the late 1990s and was at its peak in the 2000s. Although the ganguro’s had black faces they had bleached hair, they were an outgrowth of chapatsu hair dyeing. Their style consisted of deep tans with false eyelashes and they wore both black and white eyeliner. They also wore platform sandles and boots and they liked to wear brightly coloured clothes. These clothes consisted of tie-dyed sarongs, mini-skirts, hibiscus flower hairpins, and lots of bracelets, rings and necklaces.

Some of the Ganguro’s followers like to take it to the extreme and get darker tans, bleach their hair up to a platinum blonde shade, where white lipstick, multicoloured pastel eye shadows and tiny metallic or glittery adhesives that they place around the bottom rim of the eye sockets.

The Ganguro style also has a specific behaviour they have their own slang which is a cobination of English and Japanese. A Japanese person would not understand what a member of this subculture was saying.

Lolita

Another Japanese subculture that was at is peak in the 2000s was the Lolita.It first began in Harajuku, Tokyo in the 1980s,. It is highly influenced by Japanese children’s clothing and also from the Victorian era. The traditional lolita style consisted of pastel colours , embroided pattern prints, lace and also platform shoes, petticoats and bows in the hair, Knee length skirts and some also carried porciline dolls and teddy bears. Influences are also taken from other eras such as the 1950s and the French Rococo style. Although lolita has a historical look and feel, it is not from any particular period and tends to combine many different historical styles together for its own individual look.

The lolita subculture has now branched off into many different sub-genres, these consist of the pretty little sweet lolita, (with even more pink, baby blue or white and a surfeit of lace) the classic and the punk. Some followers of the lolita fashion style have been known to merge lolita with other popular street fashions, leading to hybrid styles such as cyber-lolita or wa-lolita, where a traditional Japanese aesthetic reflected in the kimono-style garment is combined with the bell-shaped skirt and headdress worn by lolitas.

One of the most known of the sub- genres is the gothic lolita (known in Japan as gosurori, a contraction of the phrase ‘gothic lolita’). The gothic lolita tends to wear black lace, monotone black, grey or white dresses, She also wears crosses or crucifixes in a style similar to the Western Goth’